The black troops… have precisely those qualities that are demanded in the long struggles in modern war: rusticity, endurance, tenacity, the instinct for combat, the absence of nervousness, and an incomparable power of shock. Their arrival on the battlefield would have a considerable moral effect on the adversary.11
This idea that the real power of Africans on the battlefield was as shock troops – men who would lead the attack, and through their military prowess and sheer impact on the nerves of their opponents overwhelm them physically and psychologically – stood at the heart of Mangin’s theory. In one of the more portentous passages, which perhaps betrays the influence of de Vogüé, Mangin foresaw that ‘In future battles, these primitives, for whom life counts so little and whose young blood flows so ardently, as if avid to be shed, will certainly attain the old “French fury”, and will reinvigorate it if necessary.’12
It was this assertion that savage and fatalistic African troops had the capacity to overwhelm their enemies by the shock of their attack that was later to prove so disastrous for them. Yet in this view, Mangin was not a lone voice. General Hippolyte Langlois, of the Ecole de Guerre, averred:
Those who belong to the black race take their qualities as warriors from their heredity, because, as far back as we can go in history, the state of war has been normal in Africa – their social situation that teaches them discipline; the harsh conditions of their existence which render them persistent, their carelessness, which makes them tenacious in the long struggles that characterise the modern battles; their bloody and fatalist temperament, which renders them terrible and shocking… .13
While serving in the colonies, Mangin had concluded that these qualities were shared by all the peoples of West Africa – that they were all, to some degree, warrior peoples. Like Langlois, he concluded that this was a consequence of history, as Africa had been for centuries one ‘vast battlefield’. However, Mangin had also become convinced that some Africans were more martial than others. Viewing disparate African societies, their traditions and cultures, through the prism of European values and the current racial theories, Mangin blithely ranked, categorized, praised or dismissed the peoples of French West Africa. His French concept of les races guerrières was in many respects identical to the British notion of the martial races of India. The British themselves were perfectly happy to concede that such classifications were just as pertinent to the peoples of West Africa’s forest belt as they were to the hill tribes of the North-West Frontier. (Indeed, in the 1890s, when the British and French were at times bitter rivals for territory in West Africa, both nations feared the prospect of the other annexing the lands of the most martial peoples of the region.14) In Mangin’s hands, these ideas went on to determine which African societies found themselves drawn into the World’s War. Mangin’s theories often decided who lived and who died.
There was, however, much opposition to the Force Noire theory and a heated debate in the press. Mangin and his supporters were able to marshal, in support of their campaign within France, the fact that these ideas provoked immense hostility in Germany, on the part of both its right-wing and left-wing press.15 There was visceral German opposition to the mere suggestion that a black French army might, in some future conflict, be deployed in Europe. In the febrile atmosphere of Third Republic France, such loud squeals of opposition was taken as proof that Germany feared the men of France’s African colonies and that, therefore, Mangin was onto something.
When the German Army crossed into Belgium in August 1914, and the French launched their own invasion over the German frontiers in the hope of finally seizing back Alsace and Lorraine, the French High Command was nevertheless convinced (as much as anyone) that the war would be a short affair, in which French national spirit and the legendary élan of its fighting men – pent up since the defeat of 1871 – would carry the day. In August 1914, France had around 90,000 troupes indigènes in her ranks – non-white soldiers from West and North Africa. Although it was widely expected that they would play only a marginal role in this short war in Europe, they were quickly mobilized. When the Lahore Division of the British Indian Corps landed in Marseilles in late September 1914, they encountered colonial soldiers from across the French Empire on the streets of that port city. Just weeks later, the Tirailleurs Sénégalais were in battle in Picardy and Belgium, some under the command of Mangin himself. Like the Indian Corps, the Tirailleurs Sénégalais were thrown into the front lines near Ypres – used piecemeal to plug gaps and shore up improvised defensive lines. In those desperate days, when it seemed entirely possible that the Germans might break through and reach the coast, four battalions of Tirailleurs Sénégalais fought on the bend of the River Yser. At the Belgian town of Dixmude (Diksmuide), they were routed by a German attacking force four times their size. One battalion of Africans was reduced from over 1,000 to just 30 men and 2 officers.16 In November, three further divisions of Tirailleurs Sénégalais were committed to the defence. By the end of 1914, the Tirailleurs Sénégalais had won praise and had played perhaps a greater part than had been initially expected in the battles of outflanking manoeuvres that saved France in 1914 – but which, in doing so, created the trenches of the Western Front.
The cost of France’s salvation in 1914, however, had been little short of catastrophic. Over a third-of-a-million French soldiers had been killed. More Frenchmen died in 1914 than in any other year of the war – even though there were only five months of fighting. Half of all the French soldiers who were to die in the First World War – around 1.3 million – fell in the first fifteen months of the conflict.17 Suddenly, the demographic nightmares that had haunted the nation loomed larger than ever.
In late 1914 and early 1915, modest recruitment drives were undertaken in the French colonies – West Africa, North Africa, Madagascar and French Indochina. Yet still the plan was that these recruits would, for the most part, be tasked with garrisoning duties in North Africa, allowing white French troops to defend their mother country. But towards the end of 1915, around the time that the now exhausted British Indian Corps was leaving Marseilles, French policy shifted decisively. Finally convinced that the war would be longer than anyone had dared imagine in the summer of 1914, the High Command cleared the way for a series of mass recruitment drives in the French colonies. Throughout 1915 Mangin had been working behind the scenes. In preparation for what he was convinced would be the decisive phase of the war, he had vocally argued that France should urgently raise a colonial army 700,000 strong, 300,000 of whom would be drawn from the warrior tribes of West Africa – this despite the continuing lack of any reliable population statistics for the regions in question. To harry the government into action, a law calling for the recruitment of troops from West Africa was introduced into the French Parliament. One of the Parliamentary sponsors stated that France not only had the moral right to recruit men from its colonies, but also that the country had a moral obligation to do so:
We have the right to call on the aid of our colonial subjects. We have brought to our colonies prosperity and peace. We have delivered them from epidemics, raids, periodic famines, and civil wars. We have shed the most precious of our blood in order to spare them from powerful invaders and slave traders. Today, we struggle for them as well as for us. The yoke of the invader – they know it – would weigh as heavily, more heavily, on them than on us. France overseas fights for its own cause. We have the right to call on our colonies – and we have a duty.18
Before the new law could even be passed, the government acted. Two decrees, on 9 October and 14 October 1915, set out a scheme for a hugely expanded recruitment drive in West Africa, with a goal of 50,000 recruits in 1916. What followed was one of the great scandals in the French conduct of the First World War.
The recruitment in West Africa was, for the most part, carried out by African intermediaries – who were expected to meet quotas and were paid by results. Although there were recruits who volunteered for service, many were coerced.19 The majority of the earliest
recruits were drawn from what are now Senegal and Niger, then later the levies fell heavily on the peoples of Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea and Dahomey.20 The recruiters carried out their work with vigorous brutality. When quotas of men were not forthcoming, whole villages were subjected to collective punishments. Crops were destroyed, livestock killed, homes and entire villages set alight. The relatives of men who had fled to avoid being conscripted were taken hostage, and chiefs who refused to cooperate, or who sought to shield their peoples from the attentions of the recruiters, were imprisoned or fined. Conversely, those chiefs who acquiesced, often because they owed their position to French patronage, were given financial rewards. In the recruitment drive of 1915, half-a-million francs were set aside for payments and bounties to compliant chiefs, described as ‘compensation’ for the men they provided.21 In the initial stages, men were forced to take part in lotteries to determine who would stay with their families and who would be sent to war. Later, a one-son-per-family rule was introduced – a policy that was bizarrely similar to the Devshirme system of the Ottoman Empire, the harvesting of Christian boys in the Balkans, which had been a favourite target for the moral outrage of anti-Turkish propagandists of the nineteenth century. Oral histories carried out among former Tirailleurs Sénégalais by the pioneering historian Joe Lunn, in the late twentieth century, confirmed both the existence of this policy and revealed that the burden tended to fall on younger sons, sparing the elder boys who were better placed to care for their parents. A predictable consequence of this method of forced conscription, when imposed upon highly stratified and hierarchical societies, was that the men and boys coerced into the French Army tended to be the most powerless and the poorest in their societies. Some were orphan boys, who had no-one to protect them from the recruiters. Others were slaves.22
The African recruiters, who worked either for local chiefs or directly for the French colonial authorities, acted as a moral firewall between the French and the grim process of recruitment. This permitted the French to claim that they were merely the beneficiaries of the process, rather than its agents. Yet there is considerable evidence that the French were fully aware of what their intermediaries were up to. French colonial commandants in the field and their superiors in the urban centres fretted about the damage being done to the social fabric and economic potential of the region. Their reports, cataloguing the consequences of the recruitment drives, are clear proof that they were cognizant of what was taking place. Commandants spoke not only of how the recruiting drive was threatening the economic potential of the French colonies, but also listed incidents of armed resistance against the recruiters. They spoke of mass abscondings into the bush by whole villages and of men who had resorted to self-mutilation to save themselves from abduction by recruiters. An unknown number fled to neighbouring colonies – to the British Gold Coast (Ghana), American-protected Liberia, Gambia, or Portuguese Guinea – to place themselves beyond the reach of the recruiters and the French authorities.23 Living in the shadow of recent famines and epidemics, a high proportion of the region’s men were in ill health, as the French and their intermediaries discovered. The logical corollary of those findings, that the French might reasonably have reached, was that the region could ill afford to lose its most fit and capable men, and local commandants right up to the governor-generals reached exactly that conclusion. They rightly feared the results of the recruitment would be shortages of food and local rebellion. But in 1915 and 1916 Paris gave little heed to their warnings, and the harvest of men continued unabated.
While the local chiefs acted as a filter between their societies and the recruiters, exercising power over which men and boys were to be offered up, some men were ‘recruited’ more directly. They were simply seized from their villages or captured in the fields by armed recruiting gangs. The raids were most common in those areas furthest from the French centres of power, where their authority was diluted by distance and terrain. There, recruiters embarked on expeditions that amounted to manhunts. There were reports that men and boys were marched to the collecting stations, bound by ropes or chains or bound together in coffles. In September 1917, the new Governor-General of French West Africa, the sensible and far-sighted Joost van Vollenhoven, wrote:
Since the beginning of the war, recruitment has become a hunt for men… Out of recruitment has resulted an unpopularity that has become universal from the very day when recruits were asked to serve in Europe and grim, determined, terrible revolts started against the white man, who had hitherto been tolerated, sometimes even loved, but who, transformed into a recruiting agent, had become a detested enemy, the image of the slave hunters he had defeated and replaced himself.24
As van Vollenhoven was well aware, French colonialists had justified their take-over of much of West Africa – to themselves and to Africans – on the grounds that the French mission civilisatrice would bring an end to the slave trade in that part of the continent. Yet the truth is that during the First World War African men were seized from their villages, held prisoner and marched in chains, and were then shipped to the battlefields of France to fight in the name of liberty and civilization. The French even had a phrase for enforced recruitment of Africans: l’impôt du sang, ‘the tax in blood’.
In December 1915, not long after the mass recruitment drive in French West Africa had got under way, the German High Command made a strategic decision of its own, one informed by the French manpower crisis and the stalemate on the Western Front. A year and a half into the war, there were those on both sides who were ever more convinced that the struggle on the Western Front had become, above all, a demographic conflict, in which numbers counted perhaps above all else. Every British and French offensive on the Western Front in 1915 had failed. As things stood, it appeared impossible to achieve a breakthrough. Such considerations led the German High Command to a brutal conclusion.25
Erich von Falkenhayn, German Chief of the General Staff since Moltke’s fall in September 1914, had never believed that the war would be short. By December 1915 he concluded that while some grand strategic victory might be out of reach, perhaps the wholesale slaughter of the enemy, leading to their exhaustion and a collapse of the will to fight, might achieve the same end. There is evidence that Falkenhayn had, from the start, imagined the war as a conflict of attrition in which racial strength and Darwinian fitness would be among the deciding factors.26 In the infamous Christmas Memorandum that Falkenhayn claimed in his memoir to have written at the end of 1915, he summarized the military situation: ‘France has been weakened militarily and economically – almost to the limit of what it can stand.’ As the Russians on the Eastern Front seemed unable, for the time being, to launch a major offensive, Germany was in a position to dictate the terms of the fighting in 1916. ‘There are targets,’ Falkenhayn went on to explain:
…lying within reach behind the French section of the Western Front for which the French leadership would need to use their very last man. Should they do this, then France would bleed to death, for there is no retreat, regardless if we ourselves reach the target or not. Should they not do this, and should these targets fall into our hands, then the effect on morale in France would be enormous. For these operations, which are limited in terms of territory, Germany will not be compelled to expend itself to a degree that would leave it seriously exposed on other fronts… The targets being spoken of are Belfort and Verdun. What was said above applies to both of them. All the same, Verdun is to be preferred.27
Verdun, the great fortified citadel that protected the approaches to Paris, had stood firm against the German attacks of 1914; it now presented the perfect symbolic target that he believed the French would be compelled to defend.28 Verdun sat in a large salient, created by a loop of the River Meuse that jutted out from the French lines into German-held territory. Assembling a vast arsenal of 1,220 guns of all sizes, calibres and types, and laying railway lines to feed them with shells, Falkenhayn planned to turn Verdun into the graveyard of the French Army, the place where – as he
supposedly told the Kaiser – ‘the forces of France will bleed to death’.29
Operation Gericht (‘Judgement’), the German assault on Verdun, began at exactly 7.21am on 21 February 1916. After a colossal bombardment the Germans advanced through the snow, pouncing upon obliterated French positions. ‘Storm-troopers’, following newly developed battle tactics, hunted down terrified French survivors with flame-throwers. By the fourth day of the battle much of the outer zone of French trenches had been captured. Then, at around 3.30 on the afternoon of 25 February, Falkenhayn met with a completely unexpected success. The mighty fort of Douaumont was captured without a fight. On paper, Douaumont was the most formidable of the sixty fortresses, of various sizes, that defended the approaches to Verdun. In reality she had been stripped of most of her guns and was manned by fifty ineffectual and poorly-led reservists. Months earlier, the French High Command had understandably concluded that the age of the fort had been decisively brought to an end by the destruction of the Belgian forts that had failed utterly to defend towns like Liège in the first weeks of the war, hammered into submission by Germany’s enormous Krupp guns. Some of the forts in the Verdun sector had even been earmarked for demolition. That military assessment, although entirely logical, turned out to be completely mistaken.
The humiliating loss of Fort Douaumont, which was seized with apparent ease by men of the 24th Brandenburg Regiment – who wandered into the poorly defended stronghold and duped the bewildered defenders into surrendering – goaded the French people into outrage and the French High Command into action. News of its capture resonated across Europe. There was panic among the defending forces at Verdun itself and talk of a great retreat. German newspapers crowed with national pride and overflowed with near ecstatic editorials prophesying the impending collapse of the old enemy. Pragmatic voices in the French High Command, which had calmly assessed the situation and offered a reasoned and balanced analysis of the situation, suggesting alternative strategies to an all-out defence, were almost at a stroke marginalized.
The World's War Page 19